Clint’s perspective of meeting Natasha in that one soulmate AU, for @littlestartopaz.
Clint’s soulmark curves under the line of his collarbone, in tiny, precise handwriting. And it’s…interesting. It’s in Russian, he learns that real quick as a kid, and when he’s seven, still living at home with his parents and his brother, he finds out that one of his teachers speaks the language. He rushes up to her the very next day and explains, hasty and stammered, and she smiles kindly, offering to translate it for him.
He pulls down the collar of his shirt—he sees her eyes drag on the hand-shaped bruise on his wrist, but she doesn’t say anything—and she leans down to read his words.
“Let’s see,” she says, and reads out the Russian words. Clint tries to memorize the sound of it, so that he’ll know his soulmate when they meet him. “Oh,” the teacher says quietly, and smooths his shirt back over his mark. “Listen, baby, I don’t think it’s anything you need to worry about just yet, okay?”
“What does it say?”
She gives him a smile, sort of grim and sad and confused, and says, “I’m sorry, baby, I’m not going to tell you. You don’t need that on your conscience today.”
It takes him two weeks to find a dictionary and translate it himself.
He has nightmares for three days and doesn’t tell a soul, except Barney.
And then, well, their parents die when he’s ten, and they run off to the circus, and someone puts a bow in Clint’s hands. He’s good at something, truly gifted, for the first time in his life, and every time an arrow goes where he points it, it’s like a miracle.
Barney goes off the rails because he believes Swordsmaster is his soulmate, and he won’t believe Clint when Clint says that Swordsmaster doesn’t have a mark. And then they’re both gone, and Clint is wandering, and, well.
He only really has the one skill. And he’s killed before. So he starts taking jobs, a killer for hire at the tender age of seventeen, and he knows how he’ll meet his soulmate now. He’s not particularly prolific and he scrupulously investigates jobs before he’ll take them, but he’s clean and efficient and distinctive, and he’s known. It doesn’t take that long for SHIELD to hunt him down. It’s his twenty-first birthday when they bring him in—Coulson never lets him forget it, and the third ritual birthday kidnapping is about when it gets old—and he agrees pretty quick, because, while he’s no patriot, regular meals and some way to actually make a difference is pretty compelling.
He shoots through the ranks like lightning, because this is all he’s trained for since he was a kid sneaking around at the circus, and he’s off group missions and onto solo ops by the time he’s twenty-three. He’s spoken fluent Russian for years now, but SHIELD expects more, and he learns every language he can get his hands on. He’s twenty-nine when he gets the dossier on the Black Widow. It’s thin, just a few pages on a few deaths in a few towns, and another page with a much longer list of possible assassinations that no one can prove. There’s a handful of aliases, always NR initials, but there doesn’t seem to be any connection between them—a ballerina, a bodyguard, an heiress, a street thief. What they do have, though, is her next target. Clint gears up and ships out with orders to bring back proof of death.
He’s not expecting the mission to be easy. But even so, she’s like a goddamn ghost, limiting him to trailing her target in the hopes that they cross paths. Three weeks in, and all he knows is that she has red hair and speaks French like a native. It’s honestly terrifying.
And then, one night, he’s on a roof, settled in for the long haul of watching her target, and the man drops out of sight for all of a few moments before a small, lithe red-head is tying him to a chair and pointing a gun at his head. She stares out the window, and for a moment Clint feels his heart stop in the face of her blatant challenge, her eyes hard chips of green stone. Come out, come out, wherever you are.
Clint kind of can’t stand that gaze, the way there’s something missing from her expressionless face. He takes a shot, and for the first time in over a decade, he misses. She—the Black Widow—dives out of the way, into a roll, and his arrow draws a thin line of red over her cheek. Clint could take another shot from here, sure, but…
Something alive glitters when his arrow goes through the open window, a bright flash of surprise that brings a kick of life back into her eyes, and instead he shoots a line over the window and slides inside. She’s on her feet again, one gun lost in the roll and the other still in her hand, and her eyes are piercing so close.
Raising his bow with another arrow nocked, he says, cool and direct, “Put down the gun, or the next arrow goes right through your throat.”
She does put the gun down—it clatters out of her hand so hard that he has a heartbeat of terror that it’s going to go off, wild. And then her eyes go utterly blank, and she lunges at his throat with hands and teeth.
She takes him completely off guard. Her hands latch around his throat, thumbs clutching tight against his windpipe, and Clint wheezes for air. He manages to slam the side of his bow into her head, earning him a desperately-needed breath and the chance to break her grip. Her nails scrape against his skin as if trying to rip out his throat and he feels blood seep from the scratches at once.
Clint, head spinning from the attempted strangulation and his confusion, slams a brutal kick into her midsection and forces her back a stumbling step. Before she can attack again, he brings his bow up and sends an arrow straight through her shoulder, pinning her to the wall with a solid thunk.
Watching someone try to rip away from an arrow through their body without a single change of expression makes Clint sick to his stomach. She barely looks human, face and eyes empty, as if someone hollowed her out and replaced her with clockwork. This is the Black Widow? The scourge of the intelligence world? God, he doesn’t want to fight her, he wants to kill whoever did this to her.
She seems to give up on escaping the arrow and he takes a step forward, and she screams. It’s a feral, animal sound, high and grating, and she doesn’t seem inclined to stop any time soon. Clint steps back and watches, helpless.
He can’t tell if the screaming or the awful blankness stops first, but she opens her eyes and there is blood riming her lips and he can’t help his outburst.
“What the fuck was that?” he yelps, and she jerks her entire torso against the arrow. “I thought the Black Widow was the best fighter in the world!” She bares her teeth at him and they’re streaked red. She spits thin blood at his feet, and this time the sound that she makes through her teeth is a desperate whine, like a child. “Hey,” he says, and he’s gotten his kneejerk reaction back under control enough to be seriously concerned. “Hey, what’s going on?”
“I have to kill you,” she says, and she sounds like she’s almost begging. In Russian. “I—I have to, I have to, let me go!” Clint thinks his heart might have stopped. He’s listening so hard for the last two words that he can feel it in his back, in his shoulders and thighs. “Kill me,” she says, a whisper.
Clint stands there for a moment as his brain goes full Blue Screen of Death, plain text of fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck scrolling through his mind’s eye.
He doesn’t remember raising his hand to his comm.
“This is Hawkeye.”
“Agent, where have you been?” Coulson asks in his calmest voice, the one that means Clint is eyeball-deep in shit. “Are you aware that you have missed your last check-in by an hour?”
“Yes, sir,” Clint says with a wince. “I have her.”
“Do you have proof of death?”
“Um,” Clint says, wondering whether he can get away with saying funny story, the target is my soulmate. “No, sir,” he finally settles on. “I won’t take the shot.” Her head snaps up and she stares at him, those piercing, hungry eyes drilling through his skull, and he carefully says, “I’m making a different call. We’re bringing the Black Widow in alive.”
